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Behind the Curtain: Basso Bikes

It's named after a family, still run by that family, and is ever-growing.

Suvi Loponen
by Suvi Loponen 02.11.2024 Photography by
Suvi Loponen, Lorenzo Depoli
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The grey concrete exterior of Basso Bikes’ factory in Vicenza, northeastern Italy, isn’t exactly what you might expect of one of Italy’s high-end cycling brands. It’s certainly not glamorous – nor, on this rainy second day, is it blessed with the Mediterranean light often associated with Italian craftsmanship. Yet, as soon as you step inside, it’s clear this place carries its own kind of charm and authenticity.

This is Basso’s paint facility, an important part of the family-run business that began nearly 50 years ago in quite a humble setting and that has now grown to export bikes – still mostly made in Italy – to 62 countries. The brand is still owned and managed by the Basso family.

My tour through Basso’s paint and assembly lines provided just a glimpse into the wider setup of Basso Bikes and its parent company, Stardue. With a €10 million expansion underway, the company is about to unveil all-new facilities at its headquarters, dubbed “Stardue Fabrica.” With the first phases expected to be completed as soon as mid-2025, the brand is preparing to relocate and grow its carbon fiber production facilities, as well as add more warehouse, paint, and assembly capacity.

The plans even include an open-door policy, inviting the public in for a close-up look at the process of making the bikes. So what you see here, you might get to witness yourself in a couple of years, if you so wish.

A very Italian family business

The expansion is a sign of how far Basso has come. In the past five years alone, the company’s workforce has ballooned from 15 to 80 employees, and the new expansion aims to push that number to 400. Yet this remains, unmistakably, a family affair. Alcide Basso, the founder, started the brand in 1974 in his parent’s garage, bringing his brother’s racing pedigree and his own passion for bike craftsmanship together in his early steel frames. Alcide is the brother of the 1972 World Champion Marino Basso, so it’s fair to say he’s always been closely connected to the sport.

Today, Alcide’s son, Alessandro, runs the company as the CEO, joined by his brother, Leonardo, as head of marketing. (The family is not related to ex-pros Ivan Basso, who co-founded Aurum Bikes, or Leonardo Basso, who is now an assistant director at Ineos Grenadiers.)

Alcide’s wife and the boys’ mother Lucia Mazzarolo, on the other hand, founded Stardue in 1988, initially distributing brands like Alpinestars Bicycles. It also went on to become the distributor for Lee Cougan mountain bikes, a brand that Lucia acquired for Stardue, and eventually, both Basso and Lee Cougan became the heart of the umbrella company.

Lucia now acts as the CFO of Stardue, and Alcide Basso is still closely involved in product development – and was proudly welcoming us all to the paint workshop as if we were entering his family home.

It’s great to see that the enthusiasm that Alcide had decades ago has not worn off. It was in 1977 that Alcide had his first customer knocking on his garage workshop door, which sparked the start of the brand that took after the family name. The frames were made of steel, as was traditional for the time. Before too long Alcide had created something that had demand beyond Italy, too – though the father of the company is quick to add that without Germany, the company would not have gotten to where it is.

It was in Germany that Alcide found a chemical that solved the acid erosion problem in chromed steel frames, and he became the first to develop a system to protect them by manually spraying the insides of the tubes.

Basso went on to adopt anti-corrosion steel frames and create a whole database of different rider body measurements that are still used to steer the geometry of the frames. When aluminum became more widely used in the 1980s, Basso adopted the material and by 1996 they were trialling the company’s first carbon fibre frames.

Today, Basso’s lineup only comprises two aluminium bikes – the gravel adventure bike Tera and its electric sibling Vega – both of which still have a carbon fibre rear triangle. Though Basso boasts all-Italian manufacturing for its carbon bikes, the aluminium frames are made with Basso’s partners in Asia and in Europe.

The rest of the frames are made in Italy from the Toray carbon that the company brings in from Japan. Each frame is also designed in-house and at the far-end corner of the paint workshop, there is a small, isolated room that houses prototypes, and rigs for testing prototypes.

The Basso headquarters which are to be expanded to be the new Stardue Fabrica lie in the cycling manufacturer hotspot Vicenza – only a stone’s throw away from other brands such as Campagnolo, Fizik, chamois maker Elastic Interface, and Castelli, to name a few – and its two production facilities are nearby. There are also headquarters in Germany, catering to the Austrian market and soon the Swiss market (which is currently handled by the Italian HQ).

The Basso paint facilities

Basso sticker in glass window at paint facility
After you enter the paint facility, the frames waiting for treatment hang straight in front of you.

Entering the paint facilities, there are many processes that you’d think are highly sophisticated and machine-led in the paint job, but as I came to find out, many are simple and you could easily imagine them being used decades ago. From buffing the paint with a ball of fluff for an interesting effect to cutting out the decals and attaching them by hand, there are a lot of things that happen at the paint facility that are far from fancy. 

Interestingly, Alessandro also told us that due to the two-shift working schedule and a lot of manual work with the painting, you can sometimes tell which frames (with fade paint) have been painted by the morning and which ones by the evening shift. Apparently, the hand doesn’t quite do the movement all the way up as smoothly at the very end of the day, so the fade ends a little lower.

Even if things are done much like they were years ago, some things have come a long way in the history of Basso, too. Alessandro was quick to highlight the health precautions they take at the paint workshop – all of the paints are water-based so even though the painters wear masks, the paints are not as harmful as they were when Alcide first started the business. The employees also go through four annual medical checks to ensure they’re staying safe in their working environment.

With that little bit of background, let’s get to more images of how the process at the paint factory works.

unpainted and painted frames hanging on red industry hooks
These frames are waiting to go through quality checks before they enter the paint line – and leave the facility in the next four to five working days. Frames that are custom-painted are processed faster, while some remain stored here for longer.
Basso unpainted frames hanging on hooks in rows
The paint facility is one of Basso’s bottlenecks in its production. About 70 frames come in and go out each day at this facility – processed by the employees in two shifts.
Man using a hand machine to check safety and quality on basso bike frame
The first step before any paint or sanding is for all of the frame fittings to be checked. Bottom bracket, dropouts, seatpost clamp area, seatpost.
Man attaching rear wheel to unpainted frame
Each frame goes through 14 checks at this stage.
Red wall with tool pegs and all sorts of tools hanging from it
Verdict, Dave Rome?
multiple frames hanging on a rack waiting to get sanded
These frames are waiting for a sanding before they can get a coat of paint.
Paint cabinet at Basso factory, shelves full of paint cans and tubs
It looks like most paint cupboards. But this is where the magic of mixing the paints happens.
painted frames hanging next to each other, some with paper wrapping
You might think that to achieve those very sharp, geometric paint lines something very advanced is used to mask the frame but no – masking tape and paper is the way that’s done. The frames will go back and forth between the paint booth and store to achieve all the different details.
two workers attaching decals to bike frames held on work stands. A table with stickers and tools at the front
After paint, the frames and forks enter the decals room where their visuals are finished.
a woman attaching a basso decal to the downtube of the bike frame
No bubbles, and after final coating you can barely tell the decals from the rest of the paintjob.
sticker saying "italian racing passion - basso bikes" being attached to near the bottom bracket.
Each of the frames also has a serial number just near this sticker at the bottom bracket area – this allows for tracking each stage of its manufacturing process.
Alessandro Basso holding a diamante sv frame and a fluffy thing against it, with another man standing near
This little fluff isn’t a duster, but actually used to create the delicate, marble-like finish on the Diamante SV. Another thing used for this particular pattern is a plastic bag. How, you might ask – either of these is used to dab the paint before it dries.
basso diamante frame with marble-like finish
Finalised Diamante SV frame.
man checking thru axle fittings with handheld power tool
From the decals, the frames move to another set of checks. Paint is cleaned off all the mounting points and quality is checked once again.
man taking down two bike frames from a rack

Warehouse and assembly line

From the paint facility, the bikes are moved to the Basso HQ, where they are assembled and packed up ready to fly to their final destination. This is also a 2,500 square-metre warehouse that houses a whole lot of spares and the assembly line.

The upcoming facilities for this are going to not dramatically shift how Basso does things now. The parts warehouse will occupy a much larger 2,500 square-metre part of the new warehouse block, whereas bike storage takes up less than 1,000 square metres. Alessandro Basso said that seeming imbalance is because the company is aiming to not overbuild bikes with certain spec.

“This helps us – and is helping us also at the moment – where maybe a spec is not working properly on the market, or we are not able to match pricing; we don’t have 500 bikes with that spec not rotating,” he said. “We’re able to rethink the model and maybe find out the solution that we can sell.”

warehouse shelves with lots of shimano boxes, a man standing in front of them taking a picture
Shimano parts waiting to be put on bikes.
shimano boxes on warehouse shelves
So many centre lock rotors.
man in warehouse collecting parts for the basso bikes
Collecting the different parts is a manual job, no robots picking up components here.
bike assembly line
The assembly line is very controlled – each phase of the build has a target time in which it should be completed. A full assembly should take 204.8 minutes.
bike assembly line, two men working on bikes
The timings can also be used to control quality. Say a dealer comes back and says the bike was badly assembled. Basso can identify that specific bike was actually assembled in 202 minutes instead. Maybe it was a Friday afternoon and the guys wanted to get home quicker.
a tag detailing what checks have been done to the assembled bike, held by two hands
Each of the assembled bikes gets one of these tags confirming all of its components have been tested before packing.
group of empty bike boxes
Next, the bikes slot into boxes.
warehouse shelves full of bike boxes
Once the bikes are boxed up, they end up on these shelves waiting to be shipped to their destination. Despite shipping to 62 countries, Basso doesn’t hold a massive warehouse – both a pro and a con.

And that, in a nutshell, is what each Basso bike goes through from the moment they enter the paint facilities until they get trucked to their sales destination. The process involves more hands than you might imagine, even when excluding the frame manufacturing process. That is a bit of a wake-up call when you consider the price of your bike. Seeing that each of those decals, each little line on your bike – they are all the handiwork of a person, not a robot – it makes you appreciate that medium-sized businesses like Basso are still in the market.

Maybe the visit to the facilities and meeting (the men of) the Basso family made me also realise how special (and I bet at times, frustrating) it is to have something like this run by generations of family, and to employ people living around the region where everything has started. The connection that this can enable is something I hope will never cease to exist in the bike industry.

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